24 A Nf- W YORK CHILDHOOD T o us kids on the lower East Side of yesterda) it seemed that of all the thoroughfares in the city Grand Street was the only one that was named sensIbly. Other streets in our neighborhood had high-sounding names -Montgomery, Delancey, J efferson- but their tenements seethed with life as little elegant as anywhere else on the East Side, their fire-escapes were just as cluttered with bedding and with babies bawling under canopies devised of spare diapers. As for I-Iester Street, surprisingly the next-door neighbor of Grand Street, although it was named after the Biblical maiden who was "beautiful and fair," it was the most noisome street in the land; even before you came to it you smelled and heard its fish market; nobody cared how one looked on Hester Street; and it was inconceivable that even a boy born on that street should feel any loyalty for it, much less go to war for it, as we Grand Streeters often did for our street. We did more; for Grand Street a boy combed his hair and put on a collar. vV e were proud of its impres- sive breadth (I refuse to regard it with adult eyes) and its clangIng cable-cars. On Grand Street shop-windows glit- tered and coldly announced breath- taking prices; there were restaurants so gay that one of them even had a string trio playing during dinner, and there was Ridley's, the biggest and, we understood, the only department store in the world. You hurried past the frowning brick walls of Essex Market, famous for its Magistrate's Court where so much drama and melodrama unfolded, and gladly looked across the street where the Grand Museum flaunted its four-story canvas posters of three-legged girls in short purple skirts and red stockings, vast billowing fat men, bearded ladies in stunning décolleté, and dog-faced boys in velvet kneepants. At night the Museum blinded you with its arc lamps; its bar- kers filled your ears and imagination. T HOSE of us youngsters who lived within a block of two of Grand Street felt entitled to call our gang by the name of the delectable street, and we had a hard time keep- ing out of the gang those who tried to horn in, although they lived as far as four blocks away. Also, we had a problem with boys who had Hester Street addresses. ...L\.lthough techni"cally they were near neighbors, we felt they had no right to be considered Grand Streeters. Do what we could, however, we could not keep out many who did not belong, such was the press of parvenus. As I see it now, in spite of our ef- forts to keep it ex- clusive, we were the most heterogeneous boy gang, not only on the East Side, but in the solar sys- tem. Only the con- gestion of the world's largest ghetto and the gre- gariousness of boy- dom could ha ve thrown together such an assortment as we were. Our hangout was an outdoor soda- water-and-fruit stand after it closed down at night, its zinc-covered boxed- over counter and fountain making an ideal roost for the more sedentary and philosophical members of the gang. I use "philosophical" advisedly. Several times a week MorrIe Cohen, Louis "Dub," and two or three others of their ilk would be drawn by some boy impulse strange to them to spend an hour at the hangout. These boys of thirteen or fourteen would come with heavy tomes under their arms, their shoulders already rounded a little from much poring over books, their chests nothing to speak of, their heads a bit bowed as if weighted with the tremendous problems they were bringing for solution at the hangout. On one occasion Morrie Cohen brought Volume II of Karl Marx' "Das Kapital; " the same evening L . " D b " . h D ' OUIS U came WIt ante s "Inferno." That evening was made strange for some of us who overheard a fierce wrangle between Morrie and Louis over the "materialistic interpre- tation of history." Most of the gang loudly despised these bookworms and were secretly proud of their presence at the hang- out. In turn, the bookworms just barely tolerated our existence and that only because politically they had defi- nitely ranged themselves on the side -. ';1,.' . rA- "," . , API\IL 1 , 1 , l' of the "proletariat." Hovering on the outskiTts of the philosophical debates were odd fish like Old Black J 0, nicknamed for the fierce blackness of his hair and brows, Susie, so called be- cause he look e d fragile and played the violin, and "Monkey" Ike, who could give a better performance of a baboon pestered by a flea than the Zoo could furnish. Old Black J 0, who could model things from soft bread, de- lighted us with his choice of subjects, which would have dismayed the re- specta ble-minded, and shocked us with his skill; there was something anti-social about a boy who could make us feel so immeasurably his inferiors at modelling obscenities out of bread. The bulk of the socially admissible element in the gang were those who, as I have said, really lived within two blocks of the Elysian thoroughfare (always excepting Hester Street); boys whose school marks indicated neither a dunce nor a bookworm, and whose plans for adult life were normal and understandable: say, business, the law, medicine, teaching, engineering, or the higher reaches of the police force. Above all, to be acceptable a boy had to show himself an asset to a team in Prisoner's Base, Cops and Robbers, Oyster Sale (a highly melodramatic version of Hide and Seek), Pussycat, baseball, or any of the other games we played in the street or in a backyard from which we had not as yet been outlawed for breaking too many win- dows. O UR very best people were of course the lucky few who actually lived in Grand Street, for there were no tenements there, only shops. But our social leaders were not an effete aris- tocracy; even an authentic Grand Streeter had to hold his own in street games and gutter athletics or be rele- gated to the Butterfingers, or even the Sissie class. Our gravest social problem used to